The Interim Leader: The Man on the White Horse

The man on the white horse is an old and familiar image in political imagination: a heroic leader with integrity, ideals and vision. A leader who comes in and puts everything right.

The word interim comes from Latin and means “in the meantime” or a temporary state that fills a gap. An interim leader is brought into an organisation for a limited period to carry out the change needed to ensure its long-term sustainability—in other words, to improve its competitiveness.

What is wrong with this idea, and why does it so often fail?

Why does the organisation need to bring in someone from outside? Why can it not implement the necessary change with its existing team?

The answer is simple: everyone else directs their energy towards protecting the existing status quo.

How can we create a situation in which every member of the team sees themselves as the person on the white horse?

To achieve this, a leader must establish MINDSETS and SYSTEMS that support such behaviour. The leader must begin applying lean thinking to the team.

This requires three simple principles.

Anything that does not create value is waste

If a leader and an employee cannot explain how a particular role creates value for the customer—and cannot identify three to five weekly performance indicators through which the role owner can assess the quality of their performance—the role probably lacks a clear purpose or value.

People who claim that their work cannot be measured or that numbers cause stress are often remarkably precise when it comes to their salary and the discipline with which it must be paid. Such double standards create tension and stress.

A leader who does not ask every quarter whether the team has the right roles—and whether the right people occupy those roles—is like a gardener who has neglected to weed the garden.

The harvest will be poor because the weeds have depleted the soil and blocked the sunlight that the desired plants needed to grow.

Continuous improvement and lean thinking must become everyday practice

The owner of each role must ask themselves systematically and consistently:

How can the desired result be achieved faster, more cost-effectively and with less effort?

However, the process must always begin with a more fundamental question:

Do we need to be doing this at all?

Continuous improvement is primarily the responsibility of the role owner—the employee. The clearest evidence of an employee’s commitment is their curiosity and willingness to suggest ways of creating value more effectively within their role.

A leader can support and guide this behaviour through weekly, monthly and quarterly rituals.

One-off innovation programmes fail in 99.9% of cases and become a waste of money because they are not supported by the organisation’s internal systems and processes.
— Mariana Mazzucato, Mission Economy: A Moonshot Guide to Changing Capitalism

Responsibility cannot be given—it must be taken

When a person steps into a role—in today’s language, joins the company—and becomes the owner of that role, they must take 110% responsibility for its committed outcomes.

Those outcomes must be achieved. That is not negotiable.

If candidates already know during recruitment which results they will be expected to achieve, they have an objective basis for assessing whether they are suitable for the role. They also understand which skills they must develop to fulfil the promise they have made to their employer.

If, by the end of the first month, you continually hear explanations for why someone is not achieving the expected results, it is clear that they have not taken responsibility for the role.

A successful onboarding programme is also one that allows you to part quickly with someone who is either unwilling or unable to perform.

John Doerr, the author of Measure What Matters, who invested in Google and Apple during their early growth stages and supported their leaders in developing their organisations, has said:

“If a person who has stepped into a role cannot meet its performance expectations, this is not a personnel development programme. A new person with the right skills and attitudes must be found for the role quickly.”
— Google’s OKR Playbook

Two pieces of good news

Today, hardly anyone stays in the same job from leaving school until retirement.

In that sense, we are all interim professionals, invited to join a team for a limited period to implement an important change and create meaning. Both current attitudes and the legislative environment increasingly support this way of working.

To benefit fully from this new reality, leaders must redesign their organisations around an open architecture in which adding a new role is as easy as connecting a new device to a home network.

You plug it into a power socket and give it access to the Wi-Fi network.

A so-called “man on the white horse” is also coming to power in the United States.

Donald Trump won the election by promising to lower taxes. He intends to keep that promise and thereby stimulate the US economy. Given his age, he can afford to commit political suicide—he does not need to be re-elected.

Trump can make unpopular but statesmanlike decisions and say uncomfortable things as he sees them—for example, his 2018 statement in Brussels that the United States could leave NATO if its partners failed to honour their 2% commitment.

Trump has brought Elon Musk into his team as an adviser on efficiency—a man who has demonstrated his ability to make operations many times more efficient: producing cars twice as cheaply and quickly, transporting cargo into space at one-sixth of the cost, and achieving things that seem impossible to an ordinary person.

We may not like either of these men personally, but both are long-term visionaries—building a billion-dollar business is not a lottery win—and both are agile enough to notice changes in their environment and turn them into opportunities.

The European Union will also have a new leadership team. Its composition suggests that it includes people committed to implementing the changes that are needed.

It may be the beginning of a new renaissance:

Let’s Make Europe Great Again.